Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [135]
XVII: Gabriel’s Trump (Edinburgh, October 4th, 1552)
I
Nettles in Winter
(Boghall Castle, October 1551)
ON the day Will Scott married, Lymond took, unwittingly, his first step towards the Knights of St John.
By the same subtle irony, three years later, Francis Crawford of Lymond returned to the suspicious bosom of his homeland on the day Tom Erskine died.
He died at Boghall Castle, where he was brought when the sweating sickness struck him on the road from Stirling south. He did not live to see his wife, Margaret Fleming, come home from France with the Scottish Queen Dowager. Instead he spent his last hours shivering in her mother’s overdressed castle at Biggar with Lady Jenny herself, dressed in something pure and flowing, absently patting his brow with a cloth.
By then, although plied with every potion the Flemings could muster, he knew the end must be near. Fifty thousand people had died in England that year from this ailment. He had seen enough of it, as he rode back and forth to Norham as Ambassador framing the peace. The war he had helped to end had preserved his land from the scourge. The peace, it seemed, was to kill him.
Because of the peace, Philippa Somerville was at Boghall. A single-minded Somerville from the north of England, staunch allies of Lord Grey, would have crossed the Border eighteen months ago with an army, or not at all. Philippa, who at thirteen had every cell charged, like her mother’s, with stark common sense, was in Scotland because she liked Lady Jenny, and her legitimate children, and her five-months-old bastard by King Henri of France.
It was Philippa who had sent for the surgeon-apothecary when Jenny’s son-in-law was carried in. Jenny herself was far too busy ensuring the safety of her fully ratified prince. He was whisked with her legitimate children three miles away to Midculter, for the Crawfords to care for. Two counties heard him go (he was teething); and Tom Erskine, listening, squeezed an amused smile from somewhere for Philippa. Then Jenny, agelessly endearing in musty white linen, arrived to fondle his hand.
He was grateful, because she was Margaret’s mother and he had no illusions about her, and he talked to her reassuringly while he could. The rigor had gone by then; only, dressed in one of Jamie Fleming’s nightgowns, he felt the growing pressure in aching head and knotted stomach, and with it, the fire of fever. His affairs were in order; his indiscretions paid for; his father’s estates and charges perfectly bestowed. All this he had arranged when Lord Erskine had gone to France with the child Queen Mary. Of his own marriage, so short and gentle, there were no children and never would be now. Margaret’s son by her first marriage would be cared for at his father’s home.
He had not seen his wife since the spring when he had gone to France on the Queen’s business. To Margaret he could have said, ‘I am not afraid of death. I am afraid to leave a pilotless ship. England and the Emperor Charles are exhausted by war and discontent; France is freshly belligerent; Turkey is aggressive and rich. All the old wars have stopped and new ones are beginning with new partnerships and new enemies: who will guide us through the maze in the long regency ahead? Under the Sultan, all Turkey is united. France obeys the divine will of the King; the English nobles will cleave to the Regent with wealth and power to share.’
And in Scotland, what was there? A divided leadership. The French Dowager fighting the Earl of Arran for the Governorship during Queen Mary’s childhood and wittingly or not, with every French coin she borrowed, ensuring Scotland’s future as a province of France. And since England dared not have another France over her border, England was ready to seduce any Scottish noble, from Arran downwards, who did not care for the Queen Dowager, or France, or the old Catholicism. A divided nation; a divided God; a land of ancient, self-seeking families who broke and mended alliances daily as suited their convenience, and